O.C.'s changes feed author's muse

April 4, 2013

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.

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Author Tatjana Soli, whose novel "The Forgetting Tree" came out in the fall of 2012, is one of two keynote speakers at the 2013 Literary Orange book festival on Saturday, April 6, 2012. CINDY YAMANAKA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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"The Forgetting Tree" by Tatjana Soli is the Orange County author's second novel. Like her debut, "The Lotus Eaters," this book earned a spot on the New York Times' 100 Notable Books of the Year list in 2012.

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Author J.A. Jance is the second keynote speaker at the 2013 Literary Orange book festival on Saturday, April 6, 2012. MARY ANN HALPIN STUDIOS

Author Tatjana Soli, whose novel "The Forgetting Tree" came out in the fall of 2012, is one of two keynote speakers at the 2013 Literary Orange book festival on Saturday, April 6, 2012.CINDY YAMANAKA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Literary Orange

After Tatjana Soli's debut novel, a sweeping tale about a female photographer during the Vietnam War, the Orange County author wanted to write something contemporary, a story that required less research.

The work that eventually took shape found large parts of its inspiration in her present and her past, including the citrus groves she watched vanishing over the years near her North Tustin home, and a novel that thrilled her as a young fiction writer in college.

"The Forgetting Tree" arrived last fall, and with it readers discovered the story of Claire, a woman knocked down once by the violent loss of a child, and later by her own illness; and Minna, a mysterious young Caribbean woman who comes to live with Claire to care for her through her sickness and recovery.

This weekend, Soli is one of two keynote speakers at the annual Literary Orange book festival – mystery writer J.A. Jance is the other – where she'll talk about "The Forgetting Tree"; her first novel, "The Lotus Eaters"; and how she writes and what inspires her. Last week we met her and her husband, Gaylord Soli, for coffee at The Filling Station in Orange to catch up and get a preview of what she might say Saturday to as many as 500 book lovers.

"We lived up in the Tustin hills and I used drive down Culver and all these roads that were empty," Soli says of the landscape that took hold in her imagination as acres of orange trees transformed into housing over the years. "I'd never read a book in that setting. It's amazing, the changes."

The Katie Wheeler Library in Irvine, with its old, California farmhouse-style architecture, provided the inspiration for the ranch house where Claire, the outsider who marries into a farm family, comes to live, loses her son and struggles simultaneously to save the land as a working farm and herself after she's diagnosed with breast cancer.

"I definitely wanted to use the setting, and the isolation of the setting and how important it is to Claire," says Soli, who never places the story in Orange County or any specific locale, intending to make it more of a mythical place. "I wanted to use that and put a surprise in there. The surprise is Minna."

Minna is magnetic and bonds with Claire in part through telling Claire that she is a great-granddaughter of writer Jean Rhys, whose novel "Wide Sargasso Sea" is a favorite of both Claire and Soli.

"I love 'Wide Sargasso Sea' and how it turns 'Jane Eyre' inside out," Soli says of the book that serves as a prequel of sorts to the Charlotte Bronte classic. "When I was a student at Stanford, taking my first fiction-writing workshop, my favorite teacher gave me the book and said, 'This book is going to change your life.' It's beautifully written.

"When you're reading 'Jane Eyre' all you care about is Jane and Rochester, and then there's this beast in the attic. And ('Wide Sargasso Sea') is from her standpoint: There was this young woman in the Caribbean and she had this whole other life."

As Rhys created a full life for the madwoman in Bronte's attic in her novel, "The Forgetting Tree" uses a similar approach, slowly filling in Minna's history so that her actions become clearer as the story unfolds.

Both "The Forgetting Tree" and "The Lotus Eaters" are complex, lyrical books that explore the darker passions and mysteries of life, works that at times have made it difficult for marketers and others to neatly pigeonhole Soli's style.

"Obviously I see myself as a literary writer, but when you go out into marketing, it gets manipulated," she says. "So if you're a woman writer you immediately fall into what they call the pink ghetto.

"I think until ('The Lotus Eaters') won the prizes, people were trying to see it in a certain way," Soli says. In 2011, it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, one of the United Kingdom's top literary prizes. "It's a war novel, but until then it was being marketed for the romance in it. I don't think they would do that to a man who wrote a war novel.

"It's amazing how old-fashioned some of the attitudes are. Books don't have to be used as a role model. You don't have to want to be like Helen" (the protagonist of "The Lotus Eaters") "or like Claire. These two women are very strong and independent, and they have these violent things going on in the background.

"I think it's a little bit of a new experience."

A third novel is in the works, this one a departure from the darker tones of the first two.

"After these two books I wanted to not repeat," Soli says. "I had a long short story, a 40-page short story, about this cast of characters, disaffected Californians, and they all end up on this South Sea island. It's funnier, a tragic comedy."

That makes the work more fun for her, and she suspects it's the same for her editor and publisher.

"I have a great editor and she's totally supportive," Soli says. "I did worry with the second book that it's too dark. But she's been terrific.

"I do think – they would never tell me this – that they were relieved with my third book."

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